While most media attention towards fracking has focused on the threats to drinking water and health in communities throughout North America and the world, there is an even larger threat looming. The fracking industry has the ability – paralleling the housing bubble burst that served as a precursor to the 2008 economic crisis – to tank the global economy.

Playing the role of Cassandra, the reports conclude that “the so-called shale revolution is nothing more than a bubble, driven by record levels of drilling, speculative lease & flip practices on the part of shale energy companies, fee-driven promotion by the same investment banks that fomented the housing bubble…” a summary details. “Geological and economic constraints – not to mention the very serious environmental and health impacts of drilling – mean that shale gas and shale oil (tight oil) are far from the solution to our energy woes.”

In President Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, he repeated the fracking industry’s favorite mantra: there are “100 years” of natural gassitting beneath us.

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,” he stated.

Hughes concludes that the “100 years” trope serves as a disinformation smokescreen and at current production rates, there are – at best – 25 years under the surface.

Industry proponents rely on a figure known as “technically recoverable reserves” when they promote the potential of shale basins. The figure that actually matters though, is production rates, or what the wells actually pull out of the reserves when fracked.

In the case of U.S. shale gas, the booked reserves are operating on what Hughes coins a “drilling treadmill,” suffering from the law of “diminishing returns.”

Hughes analyzed the industry’s production data for 65,000 wells from 31 shale basins nationwide utilizing the DI Desktop/HPDI database, widely used both by the industry and the U.S. government. He sums up the quagmire he discovered in doing so, writing,

Wells experience severe rates of depletion…This steep rate of depletion requires a frenetic pace of drilling…to offset declines. Roughly 7,200 new shale gas wells need to be drilled each year at a cost of over $42 billion simply to maintain current levels of production. And as the most productive well locations are drilled first, it’s likely that drilling rates and costs will only increase as time goes on.

The reality, he explains, is that five shale gas basins currently produce 80 percent of the U.S. shale gas bounty and those five are all in steep production rate decline.

“[T]aken together shale gas and tight oil require about 8,600 wells per year at a cost of over $48 billion to offset declines,” Hughes writes. “Tight oil production is projected to…peak in 2017 at 2.3 million barrels per day [and be tapped by about 2025]…In short, tight oil production from these plays will be a bubble of about ten years’ duration.”

At current production rates, Hughes concludes, there is 5 billion barrels of shale oil located underneath the Bakken and Eagle Ford, which equates to ameasly ten months worth of oil at current runaway climate change-causing U.S. oil consumption rates.

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